S M Fasiullah for BeyondHeadlines
Students from across India are planning to converge in the campus of English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) to debate causes behind rampant student suicides.
Over 1,000 students will meet on 27 April to discuss the causes of student suicides and failure of educational institutions to prevent them. The EFLU campus has been boiling with protests following scholar Mudassir Kamran’s suicide.
According to organizers, massive student protests over the death of Kashmiri scholar of EFLU, Kamran, for alleged administrative negligence demands a wider debate on student suicides.
Insight Foundation (IF), New Delhi, is collaborating with the organizers who have chosen Hyderabad as the venue for this meet as nine students from university campuses of the city had committed suicide during the last one year.
IF director Anoop Kumar told Times of India that so far the focus had been on counseling students to prevent suicides.
“But we propose that faculty sensitisation programmes should be held as teachers themselves should lose their prejudices while dealing with students coming from certain backgrounds,” Kumar added.
“In several states there were cases of suicides caused by blatant discrimination on caste/religion and gender grounds. And no comprehensive investigation has been done into these cases so far. Also, the culprits were never penalized.”
Students from premier institutions such as Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and IIT are expected to participate in the meet.
Meanwhile, EFLU administration has reportedly not given permission to conduct such a meet on the university campus.
